We Are in the Midst of a Semi-revolution
Times have changed profoundly in the last two months. They will change much more.
We have said before that we believe we are in a semi-revolutionary moment. Times are changing very quickly. What seemed givens just a few years (even months) ago now are not and opportunities that we could not have conceived of are now presented to us.
The economist Murray Rothbard once said, and we generally agree with him, that “revolutions are best watched at a distance.” He said this just as much of Europe was tossing the Communist Party that had dominated it for almost a half century out on its keister.
We are in the midst of a new period of profound change right now, but unlike in the late 80s and early 90s in Eastern Europe this “revolution” is upending things closer to home.
When I was in college I took a seminar on “revolution” taught by one of the leading experts on the subject at the time. My professor, from what I could gather, was kind of a reformed 60s guy who had evolved and moderated over time. In addition to teaching at my school he also taught at The Navy War College. His understanding of Marxism, Marxist theory, and the Cold War was vast and I took multiple courses focused on these things with him. But it was in his revolution seminar that I learned the most.
We studied what a revolution is, (the utter transformation of a society, politically and culturally), where they had happened, and why they had happened. We studied the American, French, and Marxist revolutions in the Twentieth Century. But one of the most interesting revolutions for me was the Shia Islamic revolution in Iran. Though the upheaval in 1978-1979 was steeped in Marxist ideals (this is often forgotten), it was driven ultimately by a religious revolutionary vanguard that remains in power today.
One of the things I found most intriguing was that in Iran, when the revolution came, quality of life generally had been rising sharply (at least as long as one didn’t cause problems for the Shah). Education levels were rising. Income levels were rising. Women saw much greater freedoms than they had had. Things mostly appeared to be on the upswing in Iran. There were no shortages of bread like the French Revolution, or a demoralizing costly war like the Russian Revolution. So why did Persian society make such an abrupt turn?
There are probably thousands of reasons and I am no expert on the Iranian Revolution, but the thing I remembered most from my studies was that the massive change that Iran saw in the 1960s and 1970s, what many people saw as clearly positive developments, just overwhelmed the population. The general increase in wealth and freedoms came on so fast, along with rising expectations, that the population of the country (we are speaking about as broadly as one can here) just kind of freaked out.
We think lots of Americans (and others globally) are similarly (to a lesser degree, currently) freaked out now.
Today’s political and societal developments in the US (and it appears increasingly in other parts of the West) do not really constitute a revolution in the sense that all that is old will be thrown out and completely new institutions will rise up. Trump (who we believe is a vehicle not a cause) and the current political, cultural, and economic changes do not constitute some “Day Zero” moment or something. But things ARE changing in deep, extremely important ways.
Part of the reason things are shifting is because the everyday person has never been more empowered. The technology available to even the poorest people in the developed world is immense. The ability to educate oneself, to express one’s views, to coordinate causes, to engage in stock (and other) markets with the press of a button is mind boggling. Consider that ten years ago Skype and video calls were just becoming a reality. Now, we think nothing of such marvels. Twenty-five years ago most people had no email. Three years ago most people didn’t think of AI (aside from the movies) at all.
Now AI is changing nearly everything.
Technology has raced ahead. Working environments and what can one can expect in a “career” have been blown apart. Religion continues its decline.
Globalism has also become real for everyday people in recent years. It has created deep resentment. Everyday people watch (on their iPhones) as folks at places like the World Economic Forum, wax about how the rest of the world population is basically a collection of backward parasites infecting their planet. So what if we destroy small business owners by locking down their enterprises? They are SMALL business owners. We, the masters of the universe only want to deal with BIG businesses. Big businesses know how to play crony ball.
The above is the mentality of the Obamaists, the Trudeauists, and practically the entire ruling class of Europe. They care about the corporate-crony-government classes.
You the little guy? You the struggling business owner? You the people who watch while your home towns quickly erode into rusting dystopias? Tough shite.
Ten years ago the hangers on of the Davos crowd in the legacy media told the above people to “learn to code”. But now thanks to AI even the coders are increasingly out of work now too.
When the tech snobs start losing their jobs, watch out.
Then add the fact that the corporatist/government class basically told the everyday person that it didn’t matter if the borders were wide open for illegal immigration, and that this immigration would largely be funded by taxes on American wages. Too bad. So your economic security has been decimated by recent inflation. So what if you still haven’t recovered from The Great Recession or the global experiment in totalitarianism we called Covid. So what? You, do, not, matter.
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